H.L. Mencken Quotations

collected by John Webb

Progress, then, as I see it, is to be measured by the accuracy of
man's knowledge of nature's forces. If you examine this sentence
carefully you will observe that I conceive progress as a sort of
process of disillusion. Man gets ahead, in other words, by discarding
the theory of to-day for the fact of to-morrow. Moses believed that
the earth was flat, Caesar believed that his family doctor could cure
pneumonia, and Columbus believed that devils entered into harmless old
women and turned them into witches... You and I, knowing that all
three of these distinguished men were wrong in their beliefs, are
their superiors to that extent.
Men versus the Man: A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist [1910], p.29-30

If you point out that human progress, as I have defined it, involves
the practical enslavement of two-thirds of the human race, my answer
is that I can't help it. If you point out that a slave always runs
the risk of being oppressed by a particularly cruel master, I answer
that a master always runs the risk of having his brains knocked out by
a particularly enterprising slave.
Ibid., p.32

...an aristocracy must constantly justify its existence. In other
words, there must be no artificial conversion of its present strength
into perpetual rights. The way must be always open for the admission
of strong men from the lower orders, and the way must be always open,
too, for the expulsion of men whose strength fails.
Ibid., p.73

Well, then, what virtues do I demand in the man who claims enrollment
in the highest cast? .... the chief of these qualities is a sort of
restless impatience with things as they are - a sort of insatiable
desire to help along the evolutionary process. .... By his life and
labors, the human race, or some part of it, makes some measurable
progress, however small, upward from the ape.
Ibid., pp.113-4

I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of
environment and education, extending over many generations, it might
be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the
American negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise
would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white
stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the negro stock,
however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely
approach it. The educated negro of today is a failure, not because he
meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a negro. He
is, in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and he will remain
inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in
civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty
generations ahead of him.
Ibid., p.116

Generalizations, indeed, all have their limits - even this one. Apply
them often enough, and you will come inevitably upon some
disconcerting exception.... But because philosophy is long and life
is short we must assume, even when we can't entirely believe, that
[things] fall into groups and classes, else we could never hope to
study them at all.
Ibid., p.231

Here, then, I arrive at that doctrine of human rights which seems to
me to be most in accord with the inflexible and beneficient laws of
nature... Of these rights there are two classes - first, those which a
man (or a class of men) wrests from his environment by force; and
secondly, those which he obtains by an exchange of values. ...he is
exercising a right of the second class when he takes his skill and
industry into the open market and sells them for whatever they will
bring. .... There is, in a word, no irreducible minimum of
compensation, due to every man by virtue of his mere existence as a
human being. No man has any right to life, save that which he proves
by mastering his environment.
Ibid., pp.235-6

[III:22] Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction,
once we got as used to it.
[25] A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done
by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
[V:2] A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least
one honest man a century.
[20] There is only one justification for having sinned, and that is
to be glad of it.
[30] Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It
indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.
Selected from A Little Book in C Major [1916]

Archbishop

A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.

Church

A place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to people who will never get there.

Clergyman

A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.

Conscience

The inner voice which warns us that someone is looking.

Confidence

The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place.

Creator

A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

Evil

That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

Experience

A series of failures. Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.

Fine

A bribe paid by a rich man to escape the lawful penalty of his crime.

Husband

A No. 16 neck in a No. 15 1/2 collar.

Idealist

One who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

Immorality

The morality of those who are having a better time.

Jealousy

The theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.

Love

The delusion that one woman differs from another.

Morality

The theory that every human act must either be right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong.

Pastor

One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.

Platitude

An idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone,and (b) that is not true.

Psychology

The theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow, and is certainly a damned fool.

Sunday

A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.

Sunday School

A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

A Book of Burlesques [1916, 1924], 2nd ed., selected from "The Jazz Webster", pp.201-210

[6] A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
[12] Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
[30] Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him...
[32] The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.
[33] A man may be a fool and not know it - but not if he is married.Ibid., selected from "The Old Subject", pp.213-9.

The American, in other words, thinks that the sinner has no rights
that any one is bound to respect, and he is prone to mistake an
unsupported charge of sinning, provided it be made violently enough,
for actual proof and confession.
A Book of Prefaces [1917]: "Puritanism As a Literary Force", p.248

What, ladies and gentlemen, in hell or out of it, are we to do with
the Ethiop? Who shall answer the thunderous demands of the emerging
coon? For emerging he is, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and
there will come a morn, believe me or not, when those with ears to
hear and hides to feel will discover that he is to be boohed and put
off no longer - that he has at last got the power to exact a square
answer, and that the days of his docile service as minstrel, torch and
goat are done. When that morn dawns, I pray upon both knees, I shall
be safe in the Alps, and not below the Potomac River, hurriedly
disguised with burnt cork and trying to get out on the high gear.
"Si Mutare Potest Aethiops Pellum Suam" in the Smart Set, Sep 17, quoted in Carl R. Dolmetsch's The Smart Set Anthology [1966], p.243

The black has learned the capital lesson that property is necessary to
self-respect, that he will never get anywhere so long as he is poor.
Once he is secure in that department he will take up the business of
getting back his plain constitutional rights.
Ibid., p.246

It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or of the American
gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly
and completely.
Damn! A Book of Calumny [1918], quoted in The Great Thoughts

At the moment of the contemporary metaphysician's loftiest flight,
when he is most gratefully warmed by the feeling that he is far above
all the ordinary airlanes and has an absolutely novel concept by the
tail, he is suddenly pulled up by the discovery that what is
entertaining him is simply the ghost of some ancient idea that his
school-master forced into him in 1887...
In Defense of Women [1918, rev. 1922], pp.viii-ix

...in the United States, alone among the great nations of history,
there is a right way to think and a wrong way to think in
everything...in the most trivial matters of everyday life.
Ibid., p.x

...democracy is based upon so childish a complex of fallacies that
they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even
half-wits would argue it to pieces.
Ibid., p.xi

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his
merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with
something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom
deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a
shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the
best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phase makes
it, feminine intuition.
Ibid., Part I, p.3

"Human creatures," says ["the Franco-Englishman, W.L."] George,
borrowing from Weininger, "are never entirely male or entirely female;
there are no men, there are no women, but only sexual majorities."
Find me an obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality
and illusion, a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and
I'll show you a man with a wide streak of woman in him.
Ibid., p.7

The caveman is all muscles and mush. Without a woman to rule him and
think for him, he is a truly lamentable spectacle: a baby with
whiskers, ...a feeble and preposterous caricature of God.
Ibid.

The truth is that neither sex, without some fertilization by the
complementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest
reaches of human endeavor. Man, without a saving touch of woman in
him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and
lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman,
a theologian or a stock-broker. And woman, without some trace of that
divine innocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist for
those vast projections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what we
call genius. Here, as elsewhere in the universe, the best effects are
obtained by a mingling of elements.
Ibid., pp.8-9

What men, in their egoism, constantly mistake for a deficiency of
intelligence in woman is merely an incapacity for mastering that mass
of small intellectual tricks...which constitutes the chief mental
equipment of the average male. A man thinks that he is more
intelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of figures
more accurately, and because he understands the imbecile jargon of the
stock market, and because he is able to distinguish between the ideas
of rival politicians, and because he is privy to the minutiae of some
sordid and degrading business or profession, say soap-selling or the
law.
Ibid., pp.9-10

Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not
because they are lucky guessers, not because they practise a magic
inherited from savagery, but simply and solely because they have
sense. They see at a glance what most men could not see with
searchlights and telescopes... They are the supreme realists of the
race.
Ibid., p.21

The boons of civilization are so noisily cried up by sentimentalists
that we are all apt to overlook its disadvantages. Intrinsically, it
is a mere device for regimenting men. Its perfect symbol is the
goose-step. The most civilized man is simply that man who has been
most successful in caging and harnessing his honest and natural
instincts - that is, the man who has done most cruel violence to his
own ego in the interest of the commonweal.
Ibid., Part II, pp.51-52

Your true savage, reserved, dignified, and courteous, knows how to
mask his feelings, even in the face of the most desperate assault upon
them; your civilized man is forever yielding to them. Civilization, in
fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under
democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes...
Ibid., pp.52-53 [BEGINNING HALF CUT: CHECK PAGES]

The woman who has not had a child remains incomplete, ill at ease, and
more than a little ridiculous. She is in the position of a man who
has never stood in battle; she has missed the most colossal experience
of her sex.
Ibid., Part III, p.67

...the intangible and wavering line which separates business success
from a prison cell.
Ibid., p.68

If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or
Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and
eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame. All animal breeders
know how difficult it is to maintain a fine strain. The universe seems to be
in a conspiracy to encourage the endless reproduction of peasants and
Socialists, but a subtle and mysterious opposition stands eternally against the
reproduction of philosophers.
Ibid., pp.106-107

Such banal striving is most prodigally on display in the United States, where
superficiality amounts to a national disease.
Ibid., Part V, p.195

...that weighing and choosing faculty which seems to give a man at once his
sense of mastery and his feeling of helplessness.
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche [1913], p.4

In the youth of every man there comes over him a sudden yearning to be
a good fellow: to be "Bill" or "Jim" to multitudes, and to go down
into legend with Sir John Falstaff and Tom Jones.
Ibid., pp.13-14

The ideal state for a philosopher, indeed, is celibacy tempered by
polygamy.
Ibid., p.58

We are apt to forget that a great man is thus not only great, but also
a man: that a philosopher, in a life time, spends less hours pondering
the destiny of the race than he gives over to wondering if it will
rain tomorrow and to meditating upon the toughness of stakes...
Ibid., p.59

Wherefore, Nietzsche concluded that the chief characteristic of a
moral system was its tendency to perpetuate itself unchanged, and to
destroy all who questioned it or denied it.
Ibid., p.76

It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and
morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and
substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It
was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human
race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy,
heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.
Ibid., p.96

Nothing is more patent, indeed, than the fact that charity merely
converts the unfit - who, in the course of nature, would soon die out
and so cease to encumber the earth - into parasites - who live on
indefinitely, a nuisance and a burden to their betters.
Ibid., p.108

[The superman's] whole concern, in brief, will be to live as long as
possible and so to avoid as much as possible all of those things which
shorten life... As a result he will cease all effort to learn why
the world exists and will devote himself to acquiring knowledge [as
to] how it exists.
Ibid., p.123

...philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to
fit the world to it...
Ibid., p.156

...the negro, no matter how much he is educated, must remain, as a
race, in a condition of subservience; that he must remain the inferior
of the stronger and more intelligent white man so long as he retains
racial differentiation. Therefore, the effort to educate him has
awakened in his mind ambitions and aspirations which, in the very
nature of things, must go unrealized, and so, while gaining nothing
whatever materially, he has lost all his old contentment, peace of
mind and happiness.
Ibid., pp.167-8

...women, as a sex, are shrewd, resourceful, and acute; but the very
fact that they are always concerned with imminent problems and that,
in consequence, they are unaccustomed to dealing with the larger
riddles of life, makes their mental attitude essentially petty. ....
Women's constant thought is, not to lay down broad principles of right
and wrong; not to place the whole world in harmony with some great
scheme of justice; ...but to deceive, influence, sway and please men.
Normally, their weakness makes masculine protection necessary to their
existence and to the exercise of their overpowering maternal instinct,
and so their whole effort is to obtain this protection in the easiest
way possible. The net result is that feminine morality is a morality
of opportunism and imminent expediency, and that the normal woman has
no respect for, and scarcely a conception of abstract truth. Thus is
proved a fact noted by Schopenhauer and many other observers: that a
woman seldom manifests any true sense of justice or of honor.
Ibid., p.177

We see about us that women are becoming more and more independent and
self- sufficient and that, as individuals, they have less and less
need to seek and retain the good will and protection of individual
men, but we overlook the fact that this tendency is fast undermining
the ancient theory that the family is a necessary and impeccable
institution and that without it progress would be impossible. As a
matter of fact, the idea of the family, as it exists today, is based
entirely upon the idea of feminine helplessness. .... Wipe out your
masculine defender, and your feminine parasite-haus-frau - and where
is your family?
Ibid., pp.189-90

...school teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most
ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
Ibid., p.217

During the majority of his waking hours he is in close association
with his pupils, who are admittedly his inferiors, and so he rapidly
acquires the familiar, self-satisfied professorial attitude of mind.
Ibid., p.220

...the proof of an idea is not to be sought in the soundness of the
man fathering it, but in the soundness of the idea itself. One asks
of a pudding, not if the cook who offers it is a good woman, but if
the pudding itself is good.
Ibid., p.271

When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating
a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for
them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't
want them to be falling ill of smallpox in our kitchens and stables,
to the peril of our own health and the neglect of our necessary
drudgery.
Ibid., p.279

...the essential inferiority of the inefficient should be insisted
upon, that the penalties of deliberate slackness should be swift and
merciless.
Ibid., p.281

...for a professor must have a theory, as a dog must have fleas.
Prejudices: First Series [1919], Ibid.: "Criticism of Criticism of Criticism", p.12

The prophesying business is like writing fugues; it is fatal to every
one save the man of absolute genius.
Ibid.: "The Late Mr. Wells", p.31

...the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom
respectable. No virtuous man - that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A.
sense - has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a
symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading...
Ibid.: "The Blushful Mystery", p.198

The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and
agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave
truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-heap and a soul roasting in
hell.
Prejudices: First Series, quoted in The Great Quotations

[The intelligensia.] For various reasons this shadowy caste is
largely made up of men who have official stamps upon their
learning - that is, of professors, of doctors of philosophy; outside of
academic circles it tends to shade off very rapidly into a half-world
of isolated anarchists. One of those reasons is plain enough: the old
democratic veneration for mere schooling, inherited from the Puritans
of New England, is still in being, and the mob, always eager for short
cuts in thinking, is disposed to accept a schoolmaster without looking
beyond his degree. .... Whatever the ramification of causes, the fact
is plain that the pedagogues have almost a monopoly of what passes for
the higher thinking in the land. .... They dominate the weeklies of
opinion; they are to the fore in every review; they write nine-tenths
of the serious books of the country; they begin to invade the
newspapers...
Prejudices: Second Series [1920]: "The National Letters", pp.80-1

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral
prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without
perspiring.
Ibid.: "Scientific Examination of a Popular Virtue", p.174

In brief, she assumed that, being a man, I was vain to the point of
imbecility, and this assumption was correct, as it always is.
Ibid., p.177

Here, precisely, is what is the matter with most of the notions that
go floating about the country, particularly in the field of reform.
The trouble with them is not only that they won't and don't work; the
trouble with them, more importantly, is that the thing they propose to
accomplish is intrinsically, or at all events most probably, beyond
accomplishment. That is to say, the problem they are ostensibly
designed to solve is a problem that is insoluble. ....
Unluckily, it is difficult for a certain type of mind to grasp the
concept of insolubility.
Ibid.: "The Cult of Hope", p.212

The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a
problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
Ibid.: "The Divine Afflatus", p.155

The practical politician, as every connoisseur of ochlocracy knows, is
not a man who seeks to inoculate the innumerable caravan of voters
with new ideas; he is a man who seeks to search out and prick into
energy the basic ideas that are already in them, and to turn the
resultant effervescence of emotion to his own uses.
From Mencken's 97-page preface to The American Credo: A Contribution toward the Interpretation of the National Mind [1920] by George Jean Nathan and H.L. Mencken, pp.8-9

No article of faith is proof against the disintegrating effects of
increasing information; one might almost describe the acquirement of
knowledge as a process of disillusion.
Ibid., p.10

...the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.
Ibid., p.12

It would surprise no independent observer if the motto, were one day expunged from the coins of the republic by the
Junkers at Washington, and the far more appropriate word,
substituted. Nor would it astound any save the most romantic if, at
the same time, the goddess of liberty were taken off the silver
dollars to make room for a bas relief of a policeman in a spiked
helmet.
Ibid., p.15

...the thing which sets off the American from all other men, and gives
peculiar colour not only to the pattern of his daily life but also
adds to the play of his inner ideas, is what, for want of a more exact
term, may be called social aspiration.
Ibid., p.29

There is no American who cannot hope to lift himself another notch or
two, if he is good; there is absolutely no hard and fast impediment to
his progress. But neither is there any American who doesn't have to
keep on fighting for whatever position he has; no wall of caste is
there to protect him if he slips. .... The older societies of Europe,
as everyone knows, protect their caste lines a great deal more
resolutely.
Ibid., p.30

...one is always most bitter, not toward the author of one's wrongs,
but toward the victim of one's wrongs.
Ibid., p.58

The one motive that is intelligible to [the mob-man] is the desire for
profit, and he commonly concludes at once that this is what moves the
propagandist before him. His reasoning is defective, but his
conclusion is far from wrong. In point of fact, idealism is not a
passion in America, but a trade; all the salient idealists make a
living at it, and some of them, for example, Dr. Bryan and the Rev.
Dr. Sunday, are commonly believed to have amassed huge fortunes. For
an American to advocate a cause without any hope of private usufruct
is almost unheard of...
Ibid., pp.81-82

The surest way to get on in politics in America is to play the leading
part in a prosecution which attracts public notice.
Ibid., p.84

It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American
law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be
trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
Ibid., p.100

The is a bird that knows no closed season - and if
he won't come down to Texas oil stock, or one-night cancer cures, or
building lots in Swampshurst, he will always come down to Inspiration
and Optimism, whether political, theological, pedagogical, literary,
or economic.
Prejudices: Third Series [1922]: "On Being an American", p.16

No sane man, employing an American plumber to repair a leaky drain,
would expect him to do it at the first trial, and in precisely the
same way no sane man, observing an American Secretary of State in
negotiation with Englishmen and Japs, would expect him to come off
better than second best. Third-rate men, of course, exist in all
countries, but it is only here that they are in full control of the
state, and with it of all the national standards.
Ibid., p.22

The mob-man, a savage set amid civilization, ....believes firmly that
right and wrong are immovable things - that they have an actual and
unchangeable existence, and that any challenge of them, by word or
act, is a crime against society. And with the concept of wrongness,
of course, he always confuses the concept of differentness - to him the
two are indistinguishable.
Ibid., pp.27-28

All [of the American's] foreign wars have been fought with foes either
too weak to resist them or too heavily engaged elsewhere to make more
than a half-hearted attempt. The combats with Mexico and Spain were
not wars; they were simply lynchings.
Ibid., p.43

Truth, indeed, is something that is believed in completely only by
persons who have never tried personally to pursue it to its fastness
and grab it by the tail. .... Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in
life, there is no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be
exposed.
Ibid.: "Footnote on Criticism", pp.92-93

...constructive criticism irritates me. I do not object to being
denounced, but I can't abide being school-mastered, especially by men
I regard as imbeciles.
Ibid., p.100

The primary aim of the novel, at all times and everywhere, is the
representation of human beings at their follies and villainies, and no
other art form clings to that aim so faithfully. It sets forth, not
what might be true, but what actually is true. ....the novel is
concerned with human nature as it is practically revealed and with
human experience as men actually know it. If it departs from that
representational fidelity ever so slightly, it becomes to that extent
a bad novel...
Ibid.: "The Novel", p.205

[The tender-minded.] They are, on the one hand, pathologically
sensitive to the sorrows of the world, and, on the other hand,
pathologically susceptible to the eloquence of quacks. What seems to
lie in all of them is the doctrine that evils so vast as those they
see about them must and be laid - that it would be an insult
to a just God to think of them as permanent and irremediable.
Ibid.: "The Forward-Looker", p.219

After all, the world is not our handiwork, and we are not responsible
for what goes on in it, save within very narrow limits.
Ibid., p.221

Unluckily for the man of tender mind, he is quite incapable of any
such easy dismissal of the great plagues and conundrums of existence.
It is of the essence of his character that he is too sensitive
and sentimental to put them ruthlessly out of his mind: he cannot view
even the crunching of a cockroach without feeling the snapping of his
own ribs. And it is of the essence of his character that he is unable
to escape the delusion of duty - that he can't rid himself of the
notion that, whenever he observes anything in the world that might
conceivably be improved, he is commanded by God to make every effort
to improve it.
Ibid., pp.221-2

...even stupidity, it must be plain, has its uses in the world, and
some of them are uses that intelligence cannot meet. One would not
tell off a Galileo or a Pasteur to drive an ash-cart, or an Ignatius
Loyola to be a stockbroker, or a Brahms to lead the orchestra in a
Broadway cabaret. By the same token, one would not ask a Herbert
Spencer or a Duns Scotus to instruct sucklings. Such men would not
only be wasted at the job; they would also be incompetent.
Ibid.: "Education", pp.247-8

Like most other professional writers I get a good many letters from my
customers. Complaints, naturally, are far more numerous than
compliments; it is only indignation that can induce the average man to
brave the ardors of pen and ink.
Ibid., p.258

A youth of seventeen who is not a poet is simply an ass... But a man
of fifty who still writes poetry is either an unfortunate who has
never developed, intellectually, beyond his teens, or a conscious
buffoon who pretends to be something that he isn't...
Prejudices: Fourth Series [1924]: "High and Ghostly Matters", p.65

All love affairs, in truth, are farcical - that is, to the
spectators. When one hears that some old friend has succumbed to the
blandishments of a sweet one, however virtuous and beautiful she may
be, one does not gasp and roll one's eyes; one simply laughs. When
one hears, a year or two later, that they are quarreling, one laughs
again. When one hears that the bride is seeking consolation from the
curate of the parish, one laughs a third time. When one hears that
the bridegroom, in revenge, is sneaking his stenographer to dinner at
an Italian restaurant, one laughs a fourth time. And so on.
Ibid.: "Reflections on Human Monogomy", pp.103-4

The satisfaction that a man gets out of conquering - which is to say,
succumbing to - a woman of noticeable pulchritude is chiefly the rather
banal one of parading her before other men. He likes to show her off
as he likes to show his expensive automobile or his big door-knob
factory.
Ibid., p.109

Good government is that which delivers the citizen from the risk of
being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and
violently - one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric
business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more
dignified and more agreeable undertakings...
Ibid.: "On Government", p.221

Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of
Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator
tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and
the salaries of their parasites?
Ibid., p.225

That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public
education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and
awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the
duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education
is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many
individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a
standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is
its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians,
pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere
else.
"The Library" in The American Mercury, Apr 24, p.504

The Liberals have many tails, and chase them all.
Ibid., p.505

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly
moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
"The Library" in The American Mercury, Jan 25, p.122

But to denounce it as un-American seems to me to be a ridiculous
folly, a gross and idiotic misuse of words. The Klan is actually as
thoroughly American as Rotary or the Moose. Its childish mummery is
American, its highfalutin bombast is American, and its fundamental
philosophy is American. The very essence of Americanism is the
doctrine that the other fellow, if he happens to be in a minority, has
absolutely no rights - that enough is done for him when he is allowed
to live at all.
"Clinical Notes" in The American Mercury, Mar 25, p.321

The ideal way to get rid of any infectious disease would be to shoot
instantly every person who comes down with it.
"The Library" in the The American Mercury, Mar 25, p.379

Flag Pledge - An oath to defend the national ensign against
foreign and domestic foes. In most States it is exacted of school
children.Red - Any man who advocates or believes in any political idea not
commonly accepted. In America Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill would be
Reds.
Americana 1925 [1925], pp.305 and 309

It remains impossible...to separate the democratic idea from the
theory that there is a mysterious merit, an esoteric and ineradicable
rectitude, in the man at the bottom of the scale - that inferiority, by
some strange magic, becomes a kind of superiority...
Notes on Democracy [1926], Part I, p.3

Government under democracy is thus government by orgy, almost by
orgasm.
Ibid., pp.24-5

Love, to the inferior man, remains almost wholly a physical matter.
The heroine he most admires is the one who offers the grossest sexual
provocation; the hero who makes his wife roll her eyes is a
perambulating phallus.
Ibid., p.30

The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies
quite beyond the reach of the inferior man's mind. He can imagine and
even esteem, in his way, certain false forms of liberty - for example,
the right to choose between two political mountebanks, and to yell for
the more obviously dishonest - but the reality is incomprehensible to
him. And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a
quality he lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves
it must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its
natural manure. More, he must be able to endure it - an even more
arduous business. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution,
it means the capacity for doing without.
Ibid., pp.44-5

The great masses of men, though theoretically free, are seen to submit
supinely to oppression and exploitation of a hundred abhorrent sorts.
Have they no means of resistance? Obviously they have. The worst
tyrant, even under democratic plutocracy, has but one throat to slit.
The moment the majority decided to overthrow him he would be
overthrown. But the majority lacks the resolution; it cannot imagine
taking the risks.
Ibid., p.50

It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs.
If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters
out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever
close to the ground.
Ibid., Part II, p.99

The average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe.
Ibid., Part III, p.148

...many an American Congressman comes to Washington from a district
attorney's office: you may be sure that he is seldom promoted because
he has been jealous of the liberties of the citizen.
Ibid., pp.160-1

Theoretically, the American people should be happier than any other;
actually, they are probably the least happy in Christendom. The
trouble with them is that they do not trust one another - and without
mutual trust there can be no ease, and no genuine happiness. What
avails it for a man to have money in the bank and a Ford in his garage
if he knows that his neighbors on both sides are watching him through
knotholes, and that the pastor of the tabernacle down the road is
planning to have him sent to jail? The thing that makes life charming
is not money, but the society of our fellow men, and the thing that
draws us to our fellow men is not admiration for their inner virtues,
their hard striving to live according to the light that is in them,
but admiration for their outer graces and decencies - in brief,
confidence that they will always act generously and understandingly in
their intercourse with us. We must trust them before we may enjoy
them. Manifestly, it is impossible to put any such trust in a
Puritan. With the best intentions in the world he cannot rid himself
of the delusion that his duty to save us from our sins...
Ibid., pp.174-5

My business is not prognosis, but diagnosis.
Ibid., Part IV, p.195

Democratic man, as I have remarked, is quite unable to think of
himself as a free individual; he must belong to a group, or shake with
fear and loneliness - and the group, of course, must have its leaders.
Ibid., p.202

I doubt that he [Hergesheimer] could tell a noun in the nominative
case from a noun in the objective. But neither could any other man
who writes as well as he does. Such esoteric knowledge is the
exclusive possession of grammarians, whose pride in it runs in direct
ratio to its inaccuracy, unimportance and imbecility. English grammar
as a science thus takes its place with phrenology and the New Thought:
the more a grammarian knows of it, the less he is worth listening to.
Prejudices: Fifth Series [1926]: "Four Makers of Tales", p.42

For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not
true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to
exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the
false.
Ibid., "From the Files of a Book Reviewer", p.123

So long as theologians keep within their proper bounds, science has no
quarrel with them, for it is no more able to prove that they are wrong
then they themselves are able to prove that they are right. But human
experience shows that they never keep within their proper bounds
voluntarily; they are always bulging over the line, and making a great
uproar over things that they know nothing about.
Ibid., p.125

The fundamental purpose of education, in college as in the high-school
and so on down to the kindergarten, is to set the young mind upon a
track, and keep it running there in all decorum. The task of a
pedagogue, in other words, is not to turn out anarchists, but to turn
out correct and respectable citizens.
"Editorial" in The American Mercury, Apr 26, p.418

I don't think the boy of lively mind is hurt much by going to college.
If he encounters mainly jackasses, then he learns the useful lesson
that this is a jackass world.
Ibid., p.420

[Government] is apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to
carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a
separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the
population for the benefit of its own members. .... When a private
citizen is robbed, a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his
industry and thrift; when the government is robbed, the worst that
happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play
with than they had before.
Prejudices: Sixth Series [1927]: "From the Memoirs of a Subject of the United States", p.57

For youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of
intelligence: it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
When a schoolmaster is an ass, which happens in Christendom more often
than not, you may be sure that even the dullest of his pupils is well
aware of it.
Ibid.: "The Pedagogy of Sex", p.202

The eugenists constantly make the false assumption that a healthy
degree of human progress demands a large and steady supply of
absolutely first-rate men. Here they succumb to the modern craze for
mass production. Because a hundred policemen, or garbage men, or
bootleggers are manifestly better than one they conclude absurdly that
a hundred Beethovens would be better than one. But this is not true.
The actual value of a genius often lies in his very singularity. ....
The number of first-rate men necessary to make a high civilization is
really very small. If the United States could produce one Shakespeare
or Newton or Bach or Michaelangelo or Vesalius a century it would be
doing better than any nation has ever done in history. Such a culture
as we have is due to a group of men so small that all of them alive at
one time could be hauled in a single Pullman train. ....
.... Imagine a country housing 100 head of Aristotles! It would be
as unhappy as a city housing 100 head of Jesse James.
Ibid.: "Dives into Quackery", pp.237-9

It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and
everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one
apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is
to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for
proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment
they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his
right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for
withholding it from him.
Ibid.: "Life under Bureaucracy", pp.241-2

It seems to me that society usually wins. There are, to be sure, free
spirits in the world, but their freedom, in the last analysis, is not
much greater than that of a canary in a cage. They may leap from
perch to perch; they may bathe and guzzle at their will; they may flap
their wings and sing. But they are still in the cage, and soon or
late it conquers them.
"Editorial" in The American Mercury, Jul 27, p.288

It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their
government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign
of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but
one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage
its affairs.
"The Library" in The American Mercury, Aug 27, p.507

The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily
worse - that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it
and less satisfactory to those who support it.
Ibid.

The body of prehensile men constituting the government of every
civilized state is a corporation of precisely the same character.
What they have to sell to their customers is a form of service that is
necessary to the orderly function- ing of society, but they do not
produce it as an altruistic act; they produce it for sale. Their aim
is to get as much as they can for as little of it as will meet the
demand. When the times are running well for them they forget their
customers altogether and devote themselves almost wholly to their own
advantage and profit; when times are evil they are forced to consider
the discontents across the counter.
Ibid., p.508

Lincoln marked the half-way post on the road to the sewers [in
presidents].
"The Library" in The American Mercury, Oct 27, p.251

Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave
yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day,
another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich
and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are
always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as
possible.
"The Library" in The American Mercury, Apr 28, p.510

Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has
it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many
as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern
man that shows any genuine health and vigor. ...the only serious
criticism of capitalism comes from ladies and gentlemen who are
palpably somewhat balmy. The trouble with all of them is that they
are constructive critics: not content to tear down, they try to build
up. It is a fatal error...
"Editorial" in The American Mercury, Aug 28, p.507, The Curse of Government Sub-title to a review in "The Library" in The American Mercury, Sep 28, p.123

Slaves are probably quite as necessary to civilization as men of
genius. The human race seems incapable of becoming civilized en
masse. Some one must milk the cows - and milking cows and being
civilized appear to be as incompatable as drinking highballs and
standing on one's head.
"The Library" in The American Mercury, Jan 29, p.124

...our third-rate snivelization.... There is something even more
valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
Ibid.

Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well,
what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
Ibid., p.126

Today every town in Christendom has a prison, and all of them are
bulging. At least half of their inmates, on being turned loose,
return to crime. But the sentimentalists would not consent to their
abolition in favor of logical, effective punishments. They pity the
criminal far too much to do anything sensible about him, either for
his benefit or for that of society.
Ibid., p.127

...gynecologists - perhaps the most ignorant class of men, when it
comes to knowledge of women, in the country...
"The Library" in The American Mercury, Sep 29, p.127

[Mencken is reviewing the essays which were submitted to the Mercury's college competition.]
This, then, is the verdict of
survivors whose wounds are still fresh: that not more than one
American pedagogue in twenty is worth his salt. The rest run a grand
curve from scholars who know something but want the skill to impart
it, to frauds who lack both the learning they pretend to sell and the
wit to conceal their lack of it.
"Editorial" in The American Mercury, Oct 29, p.162

The typical tale was of a student greatly interested in this or that
branch of learning - and baffled in his attempts to master it by the
incompetence of his instructor. Such evidence is hard to dispose of,
for as philosophers observed long ago, a boy's judgement of a man is
apt to be pretty accurate. Women are easy to fool, and so are men,
but not boys. What they admire in elders of their own sex is usually
real, and what they view with contempt is real too. Nor do they fail
to distinguish between genuine ability and the mere habit of being
amiable.
Ibid.

In order to teach chemistry or psychology or even history or Greek a
man must actually know something, but for the teacher of English
nothing seems to be necessary beyond a crude capacity to read and
write.
Ibid., p.163

[Mencken is reviewing the essays which were submitted to the Mercury's college competition.]
The student body, seen through the eyes of the essayists, came out almost as
badly as the faculty. Life at an American college has plainly become more or
less uncomfortable to a young man or woman of active and eager mind... What they
reported was a society almost as completely dominated by mass
production as the Great Society they must now enter. The campus
swarms with youths whose talents, however gaudy, simply do not include
a talent for ingesting the humanities.
Ibid.

Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not
[interesting]? I can recall none in all the literature of the world.
"The Library" in the American Mercury, Jan 30, p.122

...the obvious fact that human beings are not naturally humane - that
they take a keen delight in cruelty whenever it seems to be safe.
"Editorials" in the American Mercury, Feb 30, p.153

[Wowsers] are all dirty fellows, and in many of them the sexual
obsession is so manifest that it becomes revolting. Old Comstock
himself, as everyone knows, kept a collection of filthy pictures in
his desk, and vastly enjoyed exhibiting it to like-minded visitors.
"The Library" in the American Mercury, Jun 30, p.

In old Abe, in fact, the cross-roads politician was always visible.
He never did anything without figuring out its consequences to five
places of decimals, and when those consequences promised to damage his
private fortunes he usually found a good reason to refrain.
"The Library" in the American Mercury, Aug 30, p.507

It seems to me that the United States would be a great deal better off
today if it had a war on its hands, somewhere or other, all the time.
I do not mean, of course, such puerile buffoonery as now goes on from
time to time in Nicaragua and Haiti, but real war, occupying say a
quarter of a million or half a million men.
"Editorials" in the The American Mercury, Nov 30, p.284

...war itself is a moral substitute for many things that are far
worse. While the late combat to free the world from Wagner, Koch and
Nietzsche was being fought, no one heard anything about the Ku Klux
Klan, or, indeed, about Prohibition. These horrors descended upon us
when the Armistice was signed, and millions of morons found themselves
without entertainment.
Ibid., p.285

Liberty was real in Athens so long as it bore some more or less
logical relation to merit - so long as the state's willingness to let a
man alone ran with his capacity to govern himself. It began to
degenerate the moment it became the common possession of all
citizens.... The climax of the process, as everyone knows, was the
trial of Socrates. By that time liberty was worth no more in Athens
than it is worth today in Oklahoma or Mississippi.
"The Library" in the American Mercury, Nov 30, p.379

The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy
and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly
have.
Ibid., p.380

...such works as Milton's "Areopagitica" and Mill's "Liberty" are not
used as text-books in the American colleges. Surely that is asking
far too much. Who could imagine a pedagogue honestly believing in
liberty? If he did his life would be one long stultification, for he
lives in a world in which he has no rights as against his superiors,
the trustees, and need grant no substantial rights to his inferiors,
the students. .... When Milton and Mill begin to be taught seriously
in American colleges then Huxley and Darwin will be taught in Catholic
parochial schools.
Ibid.

There were jails, of course, from the earliest times, but they were
used mainly to detain persons accused of crime until their guilt could
be determined. Once they were found guilty they were not commonly
returned to durance, but punished forthwith, either by death, by
exile, by fine, or by some form of corporal suffering. Prisons were
set up by philanthropists eager to do away with these ancient
cruelties, but what they mainly accomplished was to make cruelty more
facile. The very fact that they were regarded as humane suggested
longer and longer sentences, and so today, at least in the United
States, it is common for men to be locked up for years for crimes
which, in a more innocent day, would have been punished by some such
triviality as branding on the hand, a few hours in the pillory, a good
cowhiding, or the loss of an ear.
Ibid., p.381

The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine,
for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to
war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few
butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
Ibid., p.382

Alone among the animals, [man] is dowered with the capacity to invent
imaginary worlds, and he is always making himself unhappy by trying to
move into them. Thus he underrates the world in which he actually
lives, and so misses most of the fun that is in it. That world, I am
convinced, could be materially improved, but even as it stands it is
good enough to keep any reasonable man entertained for a lifetime.
As for me, I roll out of my couch every morning with the most
agreeable expectations. In the morning paper there is always massive
and exhilarating evidence that the human race, despite its ages-long
effort to imitate the seraphim, is still doomed to be irrevocably
human, and in my morning mail I always get soothing proof that there
are men left who are even worse asses than I am.
From Living Philosophies [1931, ed. by Will Durant], p.180

The common view of science is that it is a sort of machine for
increasing the race's store of dependable facts. It is that only in
part; in even larger part it is a machine for upsetting undependable
facts.
Ibid., p.187

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to
mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the
ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to
clear and honest thinking.
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly
useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however
virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must
necessarily make war on liberty, and that the democratic government is
at least as bad as any of the other forms.
....
But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe
it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is
better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better
to know than to be ignorant.
Ibid., pp.192-3

[Pedagogues:] More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind
they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now
afflicts the American people.
"What Is Going On in the World", The American Mercury, Feb 33, p.131

And out of each [schoolhouse] is vomited the standard product of the
New Pedagogy - an endless procession of adolescents who have been
taught everything save that which is true, and outfitted with every
trick save those that are socially useful.
Ibid., p.133

They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands
of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of
irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.
Ibid., p.135

...a trick that belongs to the ABC of the bureaucratic mystery: ...how
to scare politicians and public alike.
Ibid.

...a sort of Socratic minstrel-show...
"The Library" in the American Mercury, Nov 33, p.379

...those who have competence in some measure...are the only human
beings I can think of who will be worth the oil it will take to fry
them in hell.
Heathen Days [1943], p.viii

Whether it happens to show itself in the artless mumbo-jumbo of a
Winnebago Indian or in the elaborately refined and metaphysical rites
of a Christian archbishop, its single function is to give man access
to the powers which seem to control his destiny, and its single
purpose is to induce those powers to be friendly to him. That
function and that purpose are common to all religions, ancient or
modern, savage or civilized, and they are the only common characters
that all of them show. Nothing else is essential.
Treatise on the Gods [1930, 2nd. ed., 1946], p.4

All mammals, in truth, seem to have an inborn tendency to identify
causation with volition. They are naturally pugnacious, and life to
them consists largely of a search for something or someone to blame it
on.
Ibid., p.13

...it is a peculiarity of that he is a teaching animal,
and longs always to instruct and improve his fellows.
Ibid., p.57

It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for
after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the
one common denominator of mankind.
Ibid., p.95

To a clergyman lying under a vow of chastity any act of sex is
immoral, but his abhorrence of it naturally increases in proportion as
it looks safe and is correspondingly tempting. As a prudent man, he
is not much disturbed by incitations which carry their obvious and
certain penalties; what shakes him is the enticement bare of any
probable secular retribution. Ergo, the worst and damndest
indulgence is that which goes unwhipped. So he teaches that it is no
sin for a woman to bear a child to a drunken and worthless husband,
even though she may believe with sound reason that it will be diseased
and miserable all its life, but if she resorts to any mechanical or
chemical device, however harmless, to prevent its birth, she is doomed
by his penology to roast in Hell forever, along with the assassin of
orphans and the scoundrel who forgets his Easter duty.
Ibid., pp.97-98

The only safe skeptic is one who was never exposed to faith in his
infancy. Converts of more mature years are always more or less
unreliable.
Ibid., p.99

But any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to
see them misunderstood, and that is what happened to those of Jesus.
Ibid., p.220

Perhaps Jesus Himself, had He lived fifty years, would have somewhat
ameliorated His admonitions, bearing the incurable frailty of human
nature in mind. As it was, He preached a scheme of conduct that was
bearable only on the assumption that it would not have to be borne
very long - that is, on the assumption that the kingdom of God as at
hand.
Ibid., p.235

On both sides of the Reformation fence the Christian church fought for
its life, and nearly everywhere it had the support of the
universities, which is to say, of official learning, which is to say,
of organized ignorance.
Ibid., p.247

...the American Republic, the envy and despair of all other nations...
Ibid., p.251

Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated
American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas.
Ibid., p.252

There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural
phenomenon, however marvellous it may seem today, will remain forever
inexplicable. Soon or late the laws governing the production of life
itself will be discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up
business as a creator in his own account.
Ibid., p.263

...history deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets,
exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
Ibid., p.266

If the theological answer to all questions had ever actually prevailed
in the world the progress of the race would have come to an end, and
there would be no difference today between a good European and a good
pygmy in the African jungles. Everything that we are we owe to Satan
and his bootleg apples.
Ibid.

The fact, however, that threats of Hell have their social uses is not
an argument in favor of the truth of religion; it is simply an
argument against the human race. More, it is probably libellous, for
the overwhelming majority of men and women are not nearly so vicious
as the fancy of theologians makes them out [to be]. Very few men, if
Hell were proved to be a fiction tomorrow, would take to the highroad
and cut throats, and very few women would turn drabs.
Ibid., p.268

All of us, indeed, who have ever come to close quarters with
theologians must have left them with an elated feeling that our sort
of decency is a great deal better than theirs. For they are not, as a
class, fair men, nor is there any honesty in them. To find their
match in secular life recourse must be had, not to philosophers, but
to politicians.
Ibid.

The God of love that they preach invariably turns out, on examination,
to be a God of harsh and arbitrary penalties and brutalities, just as
the brotherhood of man that they preach, brought to the test, turns
out to be only a kind of hatred. Hell is still their headquarters...
Ibid., p.271

One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
Ibid., p.273

The human race is in such a dreadful state that no rational person can
talk about it without resorting to seditious and obscene language.
Life interview: "Mr. Mencken Sounds Off", August 5, 1946, p.45

Even the most clear-headed man can think clearly only for brief
stretches. If he does it for half an hour of consecutive time he
beats Aristotle. The average citizen of a free democracy does it no
more than ten minutes altogether in a lifetime.
In brief, we have lost the sureness of instinct of the baboon and
not yet perfected sureness of reasoning. It will take a long time to
do so - perhaps 100,000 more years.
Ibid.

In the end, I suppose, mankind will be got in order by the only means
that has ever worked in the past or will ever work hereafter, to wit,
by the appearance of a first-rate military conqueror. His chances of
success become better every day. Most of the peoples of the earth
will welcome him, as they have always done heretofore.
There are two reasons for this. The first is that very few people
really care for liberty: what they crave is merely security. The
second is that a military conqueror, whatever you may say against him,
is at least a better man than the politicians who now run the human
race. Compare Alexander the Great, for example, to such mountebanks
as Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt.
Ibid.

As for the atomic bomb itself, I believe it is the greatest of all
American inventions, and one of the imperishable glories of
Christianity. It surpasses the burning of heretics on all counts, but
especially on the count that it has given the world an entirely new
disease, to wit, galloping carcinoma. I have been reading with great
edification in the medical journals of the clinical pictures presented
at Hiroshima. Large numbers of the victims, I was proud to note, were
women and children. They were slowly fried or roasted to death... In
many cases their agonies were prolonged, and they suffered worse than
any bishop will ever suffer in hell.
Ibid., p.46

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In
order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many
compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes
indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
Ibid., p.48

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with
Christianity is the Christians.
Ibid., p.51

I graduated the Polytechnic very early - I was only fifteen - and never
went to school since, thank God. Most men that escape college have
a regret that pursues them, but I must confess I'm much too vain to
have any such regret. I think that what I was doing when the boys of
my generation were in college - listening to idiot lectures and
cheering football games and doing all the foolish and silly and
useless things that college boys do, I was a young reporter on the
street, and I believe that a young newspaper reporter in a big city
led a life that has never been matched on earth, for
romance and interest.
The Library of Congress interview (not the Caedmon Records's abridgement), 6/30/48, transcribed my me

No, I never got a scoop in my life. They were the things that were
esteemed in those days. They never seemed to me to have any sense:
most scoops were bad stories, and they were always exaggerated and
played up in an idiot manner.
Ibid.

I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.
Ibid.

The volume of mail that comes in to a magazine or a newspaper or a
radio station is no index of anything, except that you happen to
attract a lot of idiots, because most people that write letters to
newspapers are fools. Intelligent people seldom do it - they do it
sometimes, but not often.
I used to, in my days of running a column - I welcomed the letters
that came in, and, in fact, edited them. I was in charge of the
letter column, and always let anyone in who denounced me violently get
in - because I believe that people like to read abuse.
Ibid.

A man who is an agnostic by inheritance, so that he doesn't remember
any time that he wasn't, has almost no hatred for the religious.
Ibid.

I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but
it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free
speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think
there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to
say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press
it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his
neighbors.
Ibid.

...when I get propaganda [in the mail], and with it there is one of
those reply-paid postal cards or envelopes, I always send it back
empty... They have to pay three - four cents to get it back, and it's
my polite way of saying, "That for you."
Ibid.

...people will believe what they want to believe.
Ibid.

I don't go to hear music much because I dislike sitting in seats,
confined for an hour or two between maybe unpleasant people and having
to hear stuff that maybe I don't want to hear. When you go to a
concert, you have to take what the professor offers.
Ibid.

The way for newspapers to meet the competition of radio and television
is simply to get out better papers.
Ibid.

To sum up:
1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a
minute.
2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set
spinning to give him the ride.
A Mencken Chrestomathy [1949]: "Coda", p.9

A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four,
demands to know what you mean by twice, what you mean by two, what by
makes, and what by four.
Ibid.: "The Metaphysician", pp.13-14

Their fundamental error consists in assuming that the whole aim of
punishing criminals is to deter other (potential) criminals... This, I
believe, confuses a part with the whole. Deterrence, obviously, is
one of the aims of punishment, but it is surely not the only one...
At least one of them, practically considered, is more important... I
borrow a term from the late Aristotle: . , so
used, means a salubrious discharge of emotions, a healthy letting off
of steam....
....A keeps a store and has a bookkeeper, B. B steals $700,
employs it in playing dice or bingo, and is cleaned out. What is A to
do? Let B go? If he does he will not be able to sleep at night. The
sense of injury, of injustice, of frustration will haunt him like
pruritus. So he turns B over to the police, and they hustle B to
prison. Thereafter, A can sleep. More, he has pleasant dreams. He
pictures B chained to the wall of a dungeon a hundred feet
underground, devoured by rats and scorpions. It is so agreeable that
he forgets his $700. He has got his .
Ibid.: "The Penalty of Death", pp.118-9

School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human
existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and
unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common
decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover
that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one
really cares very much whether he learns it or not. His parents,
unless they are infantile in mind, tend to be bored by his lessons and
labors, and are unable to conceal the fact from his sharp eyes. His
first teachers he views simply as disagreeable policemen; his later
ones he usually sets down, quite accurately, as asses.
Ibid.: "Travail", p.308

The idea that [school-children] are happy is of a piece with the idea
that the lobster in the pot is happy.
Ibid., p.310

I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.

The life of man in this world is like the life of a fly in a room
filled with 100 boys, each armed with a fly swatter.

When a woman says she won't, it is a good sign that she will. And
when she says she will it is an even better sign.

If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree
of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory
that x X y is less than y.

Puritanism - The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be
happy.

Ibid., selected from "Sententiae", pp.616-626

My whole life, once I get free from my present engagements, will be
devoted to combating Puritanism. But in the meantime, I see clearly
that the Puritans have nearly all the cards. They drew up the laws
now on the statute books, and they cunningly contrived them to serve
their own purposes. The only attack that will ever get anywhere will
be directed - not at the Puritan heroes but at the laws they hide
behind. In this attack, I am full of hope that shrapnel will play a
part.
Quoted in Edgar Kelmer's The Irreverent Mr. Mencken [1950], p.79

[Kelmer writing:] And whenever his niece, his brother Charlie's girl,
was brought down from Pittsburgh, he spent the afternoons with her,
rolling the dice, exhibiting picture books, and deploying a menagerie
of rubber elephants. Once, reflecting upon his success with the
little girl, he remarked, "What a father was spoiled when I dedicated
my life to learning."
Ibid., pp.142-143

I have never tried to convert anyone to anything. No man writing can
avoid being pawed over by the imbecile type of person who is hunting
for someone to follow - the natural subordinate, the Yes-man. Some of
these vermin have followed me. I have no more grievance in losing
them than would a dog when the fleas which pestered him left him and
fell on another dog.
Ibid., to a reporter in 1929, p.264

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and
to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful
and his children smart.
Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks [1956], p.3

I long ago suggested that, in trials for murder or assault, it should
be competent for the defense to introduce testimony showing the
character of the victim. Certainly it is absurd to inflict the same
punishment for killing or mauling a perfectly decent and innocent
person, and doing the same to a gunman or other professional ruffian.
I am willing to go further. That is, I am willing to admit evidence
to show that the victim, though not a criminal himself, was of such
small social value that his death or injury was no appreciable public
loss.
Ibid., p.5

The objection to sterilizing criminals is mainly theological, and
hence irrational. .... Certainly the chances that he will produce
criminal children are sufficiently strong to justify subjecting him to
the trivial injury and inconvenience of sterilization. On the one
hand the sentimentalists argue that crime is a disease, and on the
other hand they deny that it runs in families. All human experience
is against this. Nine out of ten professional criminals come from
families that are plainly abnormal. Even if it be argued that their
criminality is a product of their environment..., it follows that the
environment they themselves provide for their children is very likely
to produce more criminals.
The theory that crime is caused by poverty is not supported by the
known facts. The very poor, in fact, tend to be just as law-abiding
as the rich, and perhaps even more so.
Ibid., pp.6-7

The essential difficulty of pedagogy lies in the impossibility of
inducing a sufficiency of superior men and women to become pedagogues.
Children, and especially boys, have sharp eyes for the weaknesses of
the adults set over them. It is impossible to make boys take
seriously the teaching of men they hold in contempt.
Ibid., p.20

No man can be friendly to another whose personal habits differ
materially from his own. Even the trivialities of table manners thus
become important. The fact probably explains much of race prejudice,
and even more of national prejudice.
Ibid., p.21

...the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy. This is
like saying that the cure for crime is more crime...
Ibid., p.29

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all
other philosophers are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should
add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
Ibid., p.48

The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no
reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong
probability that yours is a fake.
Ibid., p.63

In the long run, perhaps, we'll reach a point in human progress where
denying the truth will be a crime, and not only a crime but a
dishonorable act. This point has been envisioned by the man who
argued in Harper's...that there is a moral obligation to be
intelligent.
Ibid., p.66

Many a boy of really fine mind is ruined in school. Along with a few
sound values, many false ones are thrust into his thinking, and he
inevitably acquires something of the attitude of mind of the petty
bureaucrats told off to teach him.
Ibid., p.97

I can't recall ever changing my mind about any capital matter. My
general body of fundamental ideas is the same today as it was in the
days when I first began to ponder.
Ibid., p.118

Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence.
A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an
admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows
little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be
a fraud and a rascal.
Ibid., pp.120-1

Of all the classes of men, I dislike the most those who make their
livings by talking - actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so
on. .... It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the
facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause
from the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere
rhetoric.
Ibid., p.126

It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile
himself to the idea that after all God will not help him.
Ibid., p.141

Who will argue that 98.6 Fahrenheit is the right temperature for man?
.... It may be that we are all actually freezing: hence the pervading
stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be
intelligent.
Ibid., p.152

The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and
implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice.
Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and
willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and
suspicious.
Ibid.

I believe that any man or woman who, for a period of say five years,
has earned his or her living in some lawful and useful occupation,
without any recourse to public assistance, should be allowed to vote
and that no one else should be allowed to vote.
Ibid., pp.154-6

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is
obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which
is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
Ibid., p.183

One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the
fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing
rebuke to them, and they try to put him out of their minds. The
easiest way to do so is to insist that he keep his place.
Ibid., pp.189-190

By an inferior man I mean one who knows nothing that is not known to
every adult, who can do nothing that could not be learned by anyone in
a few weeks, and who meanly admires mean things.
Ibid., p.199

To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a
woman for a purely moral reason.
Ibid., p.201

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his
ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
Ibid., p.220

Every contribution to human progress on record has been made by some
individual who differed sharply from the general, and was thus, almost
, superior to the general. Perhaps the palpably insane
must be excepted here, but I can think of no others. Such exceptional
individuals should be permitted, it seems to me, to enjoy every
advantage that goes with their superiority.... The rest are as
negligible as the race of cockroaches, who have gone unchanged for a
million years.
Ibid., p.230

The Army regulations provide that every man must be treated "so as to
preserve his self-respect." This is the essence of conduct in
civilized society.
Ibid., p.233

An individual who forces himself to accept this or that idea, or who
pretends to accept this or that idea, not only on the ground that
believing in it is an act of virtue, but also on the ground that doing
so is prudent, is both a fool and a knave.
Ibid., p.237

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the
urge to rule it.
Ibid., p.247

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts
pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
Ibid., p.277

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. .... The
truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as
in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."
Ibid., p.282

A fool who, after plain warning, persists in dosing himself with
dangerous drugs should be free to do so, for his death is a benefit to
the race in general.
Ibid., p.289

What ass first let lose the doctrine that the suffrage is a high boon
and .COMMENT above is correct END COMMENT voting a noble privilege?
Looking back over my 19 years [of it] I can recall few times when I
have voted with anything approaching exhilaration...
A Carnival of Buncombe: Writings on Politics [1956], edited by Malcolm Moos, p.32

[Harding:] ...he has the courage of his hypocrisies.
Ibid., p.56

All the extravagance and incompetence of our present government is
due, in the main, to lawyers... They are responsible for nine-tenths
of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books,
and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them.
Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every
invasion of the plain rights of the citizen has a lawyer behind it.
If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah
jong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be
reduced by almost a half.
Ibid., p.84

The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics,
particularly, they are transient and unimportant. .... There are only
men who have character and men who lack it.
Ibid., p.117

We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.
Ibid., p.136

A good part of this ignorance is probably due to the powerful effect
of shibboleths. Every American is taught in school that all Americans
are free, and so he goes on believing it his whole life - overlooking
the plain fact that no Negro is really free in the South, and no miner
in Pennsylvania, and no radical in any of a dozen great States. He
hears of equality before the law, and he accepts it as a reality,
though it exists nowhere, and there are Federal laws which formally
repudiate it. In the same way he is taught that religious toleration
prevails among us, and uncritically swallows the lie. No such thing
really exists. No such thing has ever existed.
Ibid., pp.206-207

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in
his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights.
Ibid., p.273

If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a
trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that
is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by
changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
Ibid., pp.274-275

There is, indeed, no genuine disposition among American public
officials, or indeed among public officials anywhere, to reduce public
expenses. As I have pointed out in this place a hundred times, they
always try to lay on at least $2 every time they "save" $1.
Ibid., p.279

[Roosevelt's New Deal:] There is, in fact, only one intelligible idea
in the whole More Abundant Life rumble-bumble, and that is the idea
that whatever A earns really belongs to B. A is any honest and
industrious man or woman; B is any drone or jackass.
Ibid., p.306

[The demagogue:] His actual purpose is never concealed from the
judicious. He is always after a job for himself, and if he talks
loudly enough and foolishly enough he not infrequently gets it. There
then begins an inevitable cycle of disillusion. His poor victims,
reaching out for the moon, find to their disquiet that what he has
really handed to them is only a cabbage. He must begin to promise two
moons, three moons, a dozen moons.... Presently the demagogue is
chased away - and another rises to fill his room.
Ibid., p.307

They have convinced millions of the lazy lowly that the taxpayer owes
them a living - that every cent he earns by hard labor is, and of a
right ought to be, theirs. .... It will not be easy to dissipate such
romantic notions. It will take a long time, and it may also require
some rough stuff. But mainly it will take time, and while that time
is running on the taxpayer will have a lot to think about.
Ibid., p.317

...the intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to
propaganda...
Ibid., p.328

I have yet to meet [a socialist] who was not as gullible as a
Mississippi darkey - nay, as a Mississippi white man.
The Bathtub Hoax [1958]: "The Believing Mind", p.20

Is Genesis incredible? Does it go counter to the known facts?
Perhaps. But do not forget to add that it is divinely simple - that
even a Tennessee judge can understand it.
Ibid.: "Fundamentalism: Divine and Secular", p.122

The central difficulty lies in the fact that all of the sciences have
made such great progress during the last century that they have got
quite beyond the reach of man.
Ibid., p.124

Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to
distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a
chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a
theologian.
Ibid.: "Cousin Jocko", p.134

In some ways, indeed, [a gorilla] is measurably more clever than many
men. It cannot be fooled as easily; it does not waste so much time
doing useless things. If it desires, for example, to get a banana,
hung out of reach, it proceeds to the business with a singleness of
purpose and a fertility of resource that, in a traffic policeman,
would seem almost pathological. There are no fundamentalists among
the primates. They believe nothing that is not demonstrable. When
they confront a fact they recognize it instantly, and turn it to their
uses with admirable readiness. There are liars among them, but no
idealists.
Ibid., pp.135-6

Of Schubert I hesitate to speak. The fellow was scarcely human. His
merest belch was as lovely as the song of the sirens. He sweated
beauty as naturally as a Christian sweats hate.
H.L. Mencken on Music [1961], ed. by Louis Cheslock:
"From a Letter to Isaac Goldberg", 6 May 25, p.198

There are, indeed, only two kinds of music: German music and bad
music.
Ibid., p.203

An absolutely new idea is one of the rarest things known to man.
Letter to Isaac Goldberg, quoted in Goldberg's The Man Mencken, p.259

[Letter to Theodore Dreiser, 3 Nov 09] The scientific impulse seems to
me to be the very opposite of the religious impulse. When a man seeks
knowledge he is trying to gain means of fighting his own way in the
world, but when he prays he confesses that he is unable to do so. ....
The feeling of abasement, of incapacity, is inseparable from the
religious impulse, but against that feeling all exact knowledge makes
war. The efficient man does not cry out "Save me, O God". On the
contrary, he makes diligent efforts to save himself. But suppose he
fails? Doesn't he throw himself, in the end, on the mercy of the
gods? Not at all. He accepts his fate with philosophy, buoyed up by
the consciousness that he has done his best. Irreligion, in a word,
teaches men how to die with dignity, just as it teaches them how to
live with dignity.
Letters of H.L. Mencken [1961], edited by Guy J. Forgue, pp.8-9

[Letter to Burton Rascoe, (Summer 1920?):] ...free speech is too
dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.
Ibid., p.184

I believe that the public likes criticism only in so far as it is a
good show, which means only in so far as it is bellicose. The crowd
is always with the prosecution. Hence, when I have to praise a
writer, I usually do it by attacking his enemies. And when I say the
crowd I mean all men. My own crowd is very small and probably
somewhat superior, but it likes rough-house just as much as a crown
around a bulletin-board.
Ibid., p.186

I am often wrong. My prejudices are innumerable, and often idiotic.
My aim is not to determine facts, but to function freely and
pleasantly - as Nietzsche used to say, to dance with arms and legs.
Ibid., p.187

I believe that nothing is unconditionally true, and hence I am opposed
to every statement of positive truth and to every man who states it.
Such men seem to me to be idiots or scoundrels.
Ibid.

I can't understand the martyr. Far from going to the stake for a
Great Truth, I wouldn't even miss a meal for it. My notion is that
all the larger human problems are insoluble, and that life is quite
meaningless - a spectacle without purpose or moral. I detest all
efforts to read a moral into it.
Ibid.

I do not believe in education, and am glad I never went to a
university. Beyond the rudiments, it is impossible to teach anything.
All the rest the student acquires himself. His teacher merely makes
it difficult for him. I never learned anything in school.
Ibid., p.189

[Letter to Upton Sinclair, 10 Dec (24)] The news that The American
Mercury is "lacking in constructive points of view" is surely not news
to me. If any such points of view ever get into it, it will only be
my mutilated and pathetic corpse. The uplift has damn nigh ruined the
country. What we need is more sin.
Ibid., p.273

[Letter to Percy Marks, 3 Feb (25?)] The Puritan is simply one who,
because of physical cowardice, lack of imagination or religious
superstition, is unable to get any joy out of the satisfaction of his
natural appetites. Taking a drink, he fears that he is headed for the
gutter. Grabbing a gal, he is staggered by thoughts of hell and
syphilis. Observing that other men do such things innocently, he
hates them.
Ibid., p.278

[Letter to Charles Green Shaw, 2 Dec (27)] If I ever marry, it will be
on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself.
Ibid., p.306

Adultery is hitting below the belt. If I ever married the very fact
that the woman was my wife would be sufficient to convince me that she
was superior to all other women. My vanity is excessive. Wherever I
sit is the head of the table. This fact makes me careless of ordinary
politeness. I don't like to be made much of. Such things please only
persons who are doubtful about their position. I was sure of mine,
such as it is, at the age of 12.
Ibid.

I have little belief in human progress. The human race is incurably
idiotic. It will never be happy.
Ibid., p.307

Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom
worth a damn.
Ibid.

[Letter to George S. Schuyler, 15 May (29)] The plain fact is that
neither the whites nor the blacks know where they are heading. I have
read as much as most men and yet I can never formulate a plausible
picture of the relation of the races say fifty years hence.
Ibid.

[Letter to Upton Sinclair, 17 Oct 30] The word wowser... means one
who devotes himself to interfering with the private pleasures of his
fellow-men.
Ibid., p.323

[Letter to George S. Schuyler, 15 Jun 31] I think the Negro people
should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without
terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free
speech, whatever the excuse.
Ibid., p.330

[Letter to Richard J. Beamish, 7 July 34] My guess is that Hitler
himself will be bumped off very soon. In the long run the Junkers are
bound to come back.
Ibid., p.377

[Letter to Roscoe Peacock, 7 May 36] Communists have no more humor
than Christians. No man who believes in apocalypses can possibly
bring himself to laugh.
Ibid., p.405

[Letter to J.B. Dudek, 13 Nov 36] I begin to believe seriously that
large numbers of the American people are completely incapable of
understanding English. Whenever I write anything that sets up
controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the
editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the
plainest sentence. I ascribe all this to the public schools. They
have been debauching the American mind for years...
Ibid., p.410

[Letter to Ezra Pound, 12 Jan 37] It seems to me that one of the prime
jobs of every educated man on this earth is to denounce charlatans.
New ones are always popping up, and the common run of idiots are
always succumbing to them. There is little if any difference between
one and another.
Ibid., p.412

[Letter to Jim Tully, 22 Jan 40] The plain truth is that I am not a
fair man, and don't want to hear both sides.
Ibid., p.444

[Letter to Walter F. White, 6 Dec 43] Race relations never improve in
war time; they always worsen. And it is when the boys come home the
Ku Klux Klans are organized. I believe with George Schuyler that the
only really feasible way to improve the general situation of the
American Negro is to convince more and more whites that he is, as men
go in this world, a decent fellow, and that amicable living with him
is not only possible but desirable. Every threat of mass political
pressure, every appeal to political mountebanks, only alarms the white
brother, and so postpones the day of reasonable justice.
Ibid., p.479

Actually, [the censors's] purpose is to save themselves. In other
words, they are men severely menaced by the slightest sexual
provocation - men of an abnormal and often bizarre eroticism - men in
constant dread that they will not be able to police themselves. To
you or to me, normal men, it is difficult to understand their horror
of the most banal indelicacy. The spectacle of a nude statue has no
more effect on me than the spectacle of a beer-keg.
H.L. Mencken's Smart Set Criticism [1967]: "The Anatomy of Ochlocracy", p.154

But the true secret of the expurgator's folly is to be sought, not in
his stupidity, but in his moral fervor. He is, in brief, a
professional moralist of the most offensive kind, and, like all other
members of his clan, he is unable to estimate anything save in terms
of morality. He sees Shakespeare, not as a great artist, but as a
great teacher - and by the term great teacher, of course, he means one
who preaches the particular brand of morality he himself regards as
perfect. All passages which fail to qualify by that test are cut
out - as proofs of the dramatist's fallibility or perversity. The fact
that they may be of artistic importance never enters the expurgator's
head.
The Young Mencken [1973]: "The Expurgators", pp.139-140

What I really want to do...is to call attention (a) to the American's
lack of individual enterprise, and (b) to his lack of communal
enterprise. The first of these accusations, of course, he will
sharply resent... His chief boast, indeed, is that the civilization
he adorns puts a high premium upon enterprise and originality... But
originality and opportunity to do what? To make money, yes. To
launch new religions... - yes again. To change the old platitudes into
new platitudes, the superstitions of yesterday into the superstitions
of today - yes a third time. But certainly not opportunity to tackle
head on...the timeworn and doddering delusions of the race, to clear
away the corruptions that make government a game for thieves and
morals a petty vice for old maids and patriotism the last refuge of
scoundrels - to think, in brief, as men whose thinking is worthwhile...
Ibid.: "The American", p.296

...the newly-arrived immigrant's dominating desire to lose his
differentiation as soon as possible. It costs him a lot every day,
not only in actual wages but also in social opportunity and in public
respect.... So long as he remains a palpable foreigner, he is a
common butt, and on no higher level than the native blackamoor.
Ibid.: "The American: His Ideas of Freedom", p.306

...[The American's] large body of laws fails to serve him. Why do
such private organizations as the Consumers' League, the S.P.C.A., the
Society against Unnecessary Noises, the Society for the Suppression of
Vice, the Travelers' Aid Society, the Legal Aid Society...flourish so
amazingly in the United States? Simply because the American, if he
would enjoy his common rights, must fight for them extra-legally.
Simply because his government does not protect him.
Ibid.: "The American: His Freedom", pp.353-4

I am not only wrong, it appears, I am also immoral - the familiar step
in Puritan logic.
Ibid.: "Answers to Correspondents", p.525

[Letter to Upton Sinclair, 14 Oct (17)] So long as there are men in
the world, 99 percent of them will be idiots, and so long as 99
percent of them are idiots they will thirst for religion, and so long
as they thirst for religion, it will remain a weapon over them. I see
no way out. If you blow up one specific faith, they will embrace
another.
The New Mencken Letters [1977], edited by Carl Bode, p.76

[Letter to Estelle Bloom Kubitz, 24 Jul 19] Logically, the sanest,
kindest thing that could be done with the hopeless poor ...would be to
knock them in the head. .... Temporary poverty, of course, can be
relieved. A woman thrown upon the world with dependent children can
be helped.
Ibid., p.108

[Letter to James Weldon Johnson, 8 Aug (19)] What the inciting cause
of the current riots may be is hard to determine, but it is easy to
see in the actual rough-house the familiar liking of the low-caste
white man for a chance to be cruel, with huge odds on his side. He
is, by nature, a gang-fighter; a poltroon under his hide, he delights
in operations which allow him to kill without risk.
Ibid., p.111

[Letter to Harry Rickel, 12 Sep (20)] I cross the 40-year mark with
severe hay-fever, but otherwise in prime condition. I have no less
than three new girls lined up to be probed during the next few weeks;
I am able to drink 10 seidels of 7% without pissing my pants; I can
yell as loud as a policeman; my piano technique was never better. For
all of which let credit go to God.
Ibid., p.130

[Letter to Albert C. Ritchie, 5 Oct 32] But I wonder where we will
land if trial Judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has
committed an atrocious crime is proof sufficient that he is not
responsible for his acts.
Ibid., p.272

[Letter to James F. King, 4 Aug 34] Certainly it is absurd to say that
a man who has been taken three or four times running in crimes of
violence deserves another chance. In many a case he has had half a
dozen chances. Society simply can't endure criminals who stand ready
at all times to butcher innocent people for gain. ....
....
.... I agree with you thoroughly that very few prisoners in the
penitentiaries of this country could be described reasonably as brutal
criminals. I have, in fact, argued frequently that the average
law-breaker scarcely deserves imprisonment at all. I am strongly
against locking up men in cages. Those whose offenses are relatively
trivial could be dealt with otherwise and much more effectively.
Ibid., pp.316-7

[Letter to Roscoe Peacock, 23 Aug 34] It seems to me that a great
university ought to have room in it for men subscribing to every sort
of idea that is currently prevalent.
Ibid., p.321

[Letter to Edgar R. Dawson, 3 Dec 37] I have long been convinced that
the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want
is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public
indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his
enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding.
Ibid., p.417

[Letter to Cal Tinney, 5 Feb 41] I think the United States should mind
its own business. If it is actually commissioned by God to put down
totalitarianism, let it start in Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Santo Domingo
and Mississippi.
Ibid., p.476

[Letter to Edgar Kelmer, 1 Nov 46] It seems to me that an artist needs
no formal recognition whatsoever. He works primarily to please
himself, and if he manages to do so he has sufficient reward. The
rest may be taken on trust. I have never heard of a really good man
who went unrecognized altogether. .... I simply can't imagine any man
of dignity accepting Pulitzer Prizes, honorary degrees or other such
fripperies. Nine-tenths of them go to obvious quacks. Getting one is
like being elected to the Elks.
Ibid., p.565

But the fact remains that the Southern whites have to deal with the
actual Negroes before them, and not with a theoretical race of African
kings. These actual Negroes show actual defects that are very real
and very serious. The leaders of the race, engrossed by the almost
unbearable injustices that it faces, are apt to forget them.
Quoted in Edward A. Martin's H.L. Mencken and the Debunkers [1984], pp.41-2

That Negroes, in more than one way, are superior to most American
whites is something that I have long believed. I pass over their gift
for music (which is largely imaginary) and their greater dignity
(which Dr. Eleanor R. Wembridge has described more eloquently than I
could do it), and point to their better behavior as members of our
common society. Are they, on the lower levels, somewhat turbulent and
inclined to petty crime? Perhaps. But that crime is seldom
anti-social. It gets a lot of advertising when it is, but that is not
often. Professional criminals are rare among Negroes, and, what is
more important, professional reformers are still rarer. The horrible
appetite of the low-caste Anglo-Saxon to police and harass his
fellow-men is practically non-existent among them. No one ever hears
of Negro wowsers inventing new categories of crime, and proposing to
jail thousands of their own people for committing them. Negro
Prohibitionists are almost as rare as Catholic Prohibitionists. No
Negro has ever got a name by pretending to be more virtuous than the
rest of us. In brief, the race is marked by extraordinary decency.
Quoted in Charles Scruggs's The Sage in Harlem [1984], p.42

The notion that artists flourish upon adversity and misunderstanding,
that they are able to function to the utmost in an atmosphere of
indifference or hostility - this notion is nine-tenths nonsense.
Ibid., p.95

[Letter, 7 Jan 19] The older I get the more I am convinced that, if I
am ever to do anything worth a damn, it must be done entirely alone.
Moreover, I am more comfortable that way.
Dreiser-Mencken Letters [1986], Vol.2, p.332

[Letter, 27 Mar 21] You say you are not striking at me when you
complain of Van Doren. Well, why in hell shouldn't you strike at
me, if the spirit moves you? When I write about you as an author I
put aside all friendship and try to consider you objectively. When[,]
as an author, you discuss me as a critic, you are free to do the same
thing, and ought to do it. In this department I am a maniacal
advocate of free speech. Politeness is the worst curse of the world.
Ibid., p.437

[Letter, 17 Apr 39] Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of
on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite
simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I
hope he is in Hell.
Ibid., p.640

[Letter, 6 Dec 41] What we are looking at, I suspect, is the suicide
of democracy - as clumsy and noisy an affair as the suicide of a whale
or a locomotive. Whether or not Hitler has invented anything better I
can't make out. But it seems to me to be pretty clear that we are in
for some sort of imitation of his scheme in this country. I stand
ready to join up with anything that is announced, just as I stand
ready to be baptized for a box of good 5-cent cigars.
Ibid., p.667

Some boys go to college and eventually succeed in getting out. Others
go to college and never succeed in getting out. The latter are called
professors.
Quoted in Vincent Fitzpatrick's H.L. Mencken [1989], p.3

The uplifters have sworn to put down the villainous practice of
copulation in this fair republic, and I begin to suspect that they
will do it. . . . Their ideal is a nation devoted to masturbation and
the praise of God. The American of the future will do his lovemaking
in the bathroom, and he will be found in the same place when his
country is invaded. [Ellipsis not mine. - JW]
Ibid., p.24

My one purpose in writing I have explained over and over again: it is
simply to provide a katharsis for my own thoughts. They worry me
until they are set forth in words.
The Diary of H.L. Mencken [1989], p.133

The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At
the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down. Looking
back, I sometimes marvel that I managed, despite this implacable
hostility, to launch some of my notions. War, in this country, wipes
out all rules of fair play, even those prevailing among wild animals.
.... I have not written a single line in this war, and I wrote none in
the last, that I am not prepared to ratify today. There has been no
acquiescence in my enforced silence.
.... The government I live under has been my enemy all of my
active life. When it has not been engaged in silencing me, it has
been engaged in robbing me. So far as I can recall I have never had
any contact with it that was not an outrage on my dignity and an
attack upon my security.
Ibid., p.357

I certainly agree with your feeling about the Communists and Fascists,
though I fear I can't follow your into the arms of [the] Holy Church.
All persons who propose to improve the human race seem to me to be
equally fraudulent.
Quoted in John Fante & H.L. Mencken: A Personal Correspondence
1930-1952, letter of 11-18-36, p.104

I agree with you thoroughly that there is a great deal of bosh in
Nietzsche. Worse, the bosh occurs in the midst of his very best
stuff. Thus, there is no way to read him without swallowing the whole
together.
Quoted in ibid., letter of 3-30-38, p.120

The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the
intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the
fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a
high-school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines,
and the honor of a police-station lawyer.
Quoted in "Review of 'The Brass Check,' requoted. The American Guardian, June 21, 1941."

A good [politician] is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
Newsweek, 9-12-55, quoted in

What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom
from moral indignation, an all-embracing tolerance... when he
fights he fights in the manner of a gentleman fighting a duel, not in
that of a longshoreman cleaning out a waterfront saloon. That is to
say, he carefully guards his amour-prope by assuming that his
opponent is as decent a man as he is, and just as honest - and
perhaps, after all, right. [Ellipsis not mine. - JW]
Quoted by Alistaire Cooke in Six Men, p.94

To me the scientific point of view is completely satisfying, and it
has been so as long as I can remember. Not once in this life have I
ever been inclined to seek a rock and a refuge elsewhere. It leaves a
good many dark spots in the universe, to be sure, but not a hundredth
time as many as theology. We may trust it, soon or late, to throw
light upon many of them, and those that remain dark will be beyond
illumination by any other agency. It also fails on occasion to
console, but so does theology...
Quoted in Charles A. Fecher's Mencken: A Study of His Thought, p.84

Imagine hanging the stones of a man , where they are forever
getting themselves knocked, pinched, and bruised. Any decent mechanic
would have put them in the exact center of the body, protected by an
envelope twice as thick as a Presbyterian's skull. Moreover, consider
certain parts of the female - always too large or too small. The
elemental notion of standardization seems to have never presented
itself to the celestial Edison.
Letter, quoted in On Mencken, p.10

No great work of art was ever produced in a town in which half the
citizens of the town turned out in nightshirts and sidearms to
terrorize the other half. And no great work of art was ever produced
in a town which yielded itself at intervals to debauches of religious
frenzy, with some preposterous mountebank of an evangelist roaring
objurgations from his platform at every idea and ideal upon which the
civilization of the modern world is based. Try to imagine a
Shakespeare beset by fundamentalism, or a Goethe trying to work with
the Ku Klux Klan roaring under his door.
Quoted in Hobson's , p.55

There was a time when the American citizen was an idealist himself.
Now he is only idealism's raw material, as a cow is the raw material
of butter, ice-cream and custard pie - a stuff milked, tickled, clubbed
and pulverized into beauty by ordained virtuosi. I am still so young
that my toupee looks natural, yet I can remember when, if ordered to
toe a mark or climb astraddle upon a rail, the Americano would resist
with harsh words, and even with his fists. Now he leaps to position
like a well-trained circus horse.
The Impossible H.L. Mencken [1991], edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers: "Traffic", p.56

If it is unlawful to urge that an idea be carried out, is it also
unlawful to state it academically and point out its possible merits?
Ibid.: "On Liberty", p.75

The one sure cure for the professional criminal is the rope. Once it
has been applied to his neck, his days of preying upon his betters are
over, and the cops have accomplished something that is lasting and
real.
Ibid.: "Crime as a Trade", p.99

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and
usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who loves his country more
than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us
when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime;
he is a good citizen driven to despair.
Ibid.: "The Coolidge Buncombe", pp.411-2

Intelligence has been commoner among American Presidents than high
character...
Ibid.: "The Men Who Rule Us", p.424

I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of
college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of
mind. For even the good ones are manned chiefly by third-rate men,
and any boy of sharp wits is sure to penetrate to their
inferiority almost instantly. Men can fool other men, but they can
seldom fool boys.
Ibid.: "The Golden Age of Pedagogy", pp.556-7

It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone - that even
the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of,
say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This
assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority, no
doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them,
perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized - though I should
not like to be put to giving names - but the great masses of men, even
in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn
of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly,
they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing,
and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to
increase their knowledge.

Such immortal vermin, true enough, get their share of the fruits of
human progress, and so they may be said, in a way to have their part
in it. .... He has at hand a thousand devices for making life less
wearisome and more tolerable: the telephone, railroads, bichloride
tablets, newspapers, sewers, correspondence schools, delicatessen.
But he had no more to do with bringing these things into the world
than the horned cattle in the fields, and he does no more to increase
them today than the birds of the air.

On the contrary, he is generally against them, and sometimes with
immense violence. Every step in human progress, from the first feeble
stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority
of men.
Ibid.: "Homo Neanderthalensis", pp.562-3

The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to
discern. He hates it because it is complex - because it puts an
unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus
his search is always for short cuts. Their aim is to make the
unintelligible simple, and even obvious.
Ibid., p.564

The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to
the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has
to do with the ecclesiastical politics on Mars.
Ibid., p.565

...the fundamentalist mind, running in a single rut for fifty years,
is now quite unable to comprehend dissent from its basic
superstitions, or to grant any common honesty, or even any decency, to
those who reject them.
Ibid.: "Mencken Declares Strictly Fair Trial Is Beyond Ken of Tennessee Fundamentalists", p.590

Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as
the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
Ibid.: "Bryan", p.605